U.S. energy consumption
trends can be used as a proxy for global energy consumption trends. Prior
to 1970, energy consumption in the United States, and the world, followed
a very predictable "decarbonization" trend from carbon-based
solid fuels of wood and coal, to carbon-based liquid fuels of oil and
condensate, to hydrogen-based natural gas. In the mid-1970s, the decarbonization
consumption trend was interrupted by oil and gas price volatility, and
technology allowed solid, liquid, and gas consumption percentages to "freeze"
for nearly three decades in the United States. Over the next half century,
energy efficiency, economic stability, environmental quality, and resource
sustainability will combine to drive U.S. and global energy consumption
trends toward an ever-greater percentage of natural gas, hydrogen, nuclear
energy, and renewables. The natural gas component of the energy mix will
be increasingly satisfied by unconventional sources such as tight gas,
shale gas, coalbed methane, deepwater, subsalt, deep gas (>5,000 m),
and gas hydrates.

The shift from a liquid
to gas global economy will be gradual over the next five decades and will
require an integrated and collaborative research and technology partnership
between government, industry, and academia. In terms of oil, application
of advanced reservoir characterization technology and field management
strategies to major fields worldwide will improve reservoir recovery efficiency
and help bridge the gap to natural gas. For unconventional natural gas,
numerical and geomechanical modeling and flow simulation of fractures
will be an important research field. Direct-observation methods such as
cathodoluminescent scanning electron microscopy will provide critical
input to describe and predict fracture aperture, orientation, spacing,
clustering, geometry, relation to lithology, and cementation. Physical
and numerical modeling of salt to understand origin, mechanics, geometry,
movement, and petrophysical variation will also be fundamental to successful
exploitation of unconventional gas. Multi-component seismic research will
also be vital to an unconventional natural gas future. Key areas for collaborative
seismic research include rock physics, high-frequency sequence stratigraphy,
nine-component three-dimensional (9C/3D) and four-component three-dimensional
(4C/3D) seismic acquisition, processing, and analysis, air- and land-based
remote sensing, and continued advancements in seismic inversion, seismic
attribute, and amplitude versus offset (AVO) analysis.